24 What is Architectural History?
vacuum. The cultural history pioneered by Jacob Burckhardt
in the nineteenth century was crucial in determining these
new terms of art historiography. So too were the eighteenth-
century developments in philosophy and aesthetics led by the
German thinkers Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von
Herder.
The reduction of the critical distance of the artwork from
the present was a vital aspect of this pivot in modern art
historiography from the fi gure of the artist to the artwork
itself. It was achieved by identifying abstract mechanisms and
concepts in historical artworks that resonated with their his-
torians and the world in which they wrote. Art survives its
artists, and architecture its architects. As long as they con-
tinue to do so and remain relevant to a present-day culture,
runs this logic, their existence is perpetually contemporary.^19
Writing by Wölffl in and others of his generation explored a
balance between investment and critical distance that came
to assume fundamental importance for the detachment
affected by architectural historiography from the mid twen-
tieth century onwards. Although Wölffl in abandoned the
phrase ‘Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen’ in subsequent editions
of Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the idea had served to
foment a decisive break with a monumental tradition of art
history.
Architecture and the history of art
At the end of the nineteenth century, the history of architec-
ture was as subject to changes in art historiography as were
the histories of painting and sculpture. Wölffl in read art of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across these media,
just as Vasari had read the art of the early Renaissance. We
ought to appreciate these continuities in the work of late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art historians along-
side the novelties that these later historians ushered in.
Indeed, the fi gure of the architect-as-artist remained fi rmly in
play throughout the twentieth century for architectural his-
torians of various backgrounds. For the Italian Stanislao
Fraschetti, whose biography of Bernini was published in
1900, a work of architecture evidences the artistic decisions